WebForms, Anyone?
There's an old saying in the world of fashion, "Never throw anything away." From bell bottoms to tie-dye to wire-rimmed glasses, nothing goes out of style forever.
In the world of software development, the rules are similar, but for different reasons. COBOL, relational databases, .NET Web forms, none of these things need a comeback because they never really left in the first place.
Having been in the software game for 25 years now, I have seen a lot of hardware come and go. Would anyone like a good deal on used Zip Drives? Software technology, on the other hand, seems to last forever. Somehow it comforts me to imagine students at St. Louis Community College at Meramec, where I learned to write COBOL, still churning out bogus profit and loss reports in Common Business Oriented Language as though nothing has changed at all in the last 40 years.
As a programmer, I have tried my best to keep up with the latest trends in software development. I remember when Agile and Scrum took over the process landscape, I remember learning a spiffy new JavaScript library named jQuery, and I still remember being denied an attempt to make a production change midday due to more restrictive access policies. Two workplaces ago, at the company where I became friends with my current boss, we were on the bleeding edge of .NET development with Entity Framework, LINQ, and MVP. Then, we needed a new admin website. The question was proposed, what technology should we use? The choice was unanimous, let's go with this new-fangled REACT. And, we could learn REDUX, too, while we're at it.
Actually, REDUX is a great example of a technology that did fall out of favor. As it should have. I still don't know what value it added, to be honest.
When I started my current gig at Aviron, I had also picked up some cloud-based skills as well. I worked for a company that moved all their internal processing to AWS. So, I showed up for work so to speak, I was hired at the height of COVID, so showing up meant being in front of a camera in my home office at 9am -- expecting to get an assignment involving some shiny new JavaScript library. Instead, I was given the care of a customer whose main website was written using .NET Web Forms. The server-side language: VB.NET.
WebForms! VB? That wasn't 3 jobs ago, it was more like 8! And, could I even write in VB anymore?
It turns out there are a lot of reasons why a company would decide to stick with an older technology. Often, the reason is that it still does the job it was intended to do, so why spend millions hiring a team of developers just to bring your flagship app into the modern world? Instead, you can save a ton of money and hire a guy like me who still remembers how to do it.
Now, don't get me wrong, as the oldest person at my company by a factor of decades, I never want to be the "things were good when things were wood" guy; that poor soul who can't keep up and approaches all change with disdain. It seems to be a natural consequence of aging. You worry that you are no longer relevant, so you yell at the youngsters around you that they don't know how good they've got it. WebForms is an old technology, and it harkens back to a time when software giants like Microsoft focused on making the job of developers easier. The focus on improving the user experience was an AJAX-era adaptation. It's hard to imagine doing a complete page refresh to obtain a single value from cached data in the age of REACT, but it's still the defacto standard in WebForms. You have to go out of your way to give your users the pleasant browsing experience of pages that update without blinking.
Now, does anyone know how to wire-up a SelectedIndexChanges handler for a drop down in REACT?
- Written by Mike Krysl
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